


The East Wind

by proxydialogue



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: F/M, His Last Vow Spoilers, M/M, episode coda
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-31
Updated: 2014-01-31
Packaged: 2018-01-10 18:03:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 460
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1162828
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/proxydialogue/pseuds/proxydialogue
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A seven minute war on a nearly empty runway.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The East Wind

In life, there are all kinds of war. 

You cannot kiss the man you love in front of your pregnant wife. Even if he’s is—and he really is—going away forever this time. Even if, as only happens in war, you are being given the rare, impossible privilege of knowing a last chance when you see it.

He watches with cool, unhappy eyes. And he smiles and draws breath through his nose (the way he does when he’s suffocating on the things he’ll never let you admit to him) because he sees it too. It’s a wide-angle lens on your entire lives: this middle of nowhere blacktop with the sound of military jets humming in the distance. 

Where are the bullets now? 

You’ll spend the rest of your life ducking under them. 

But at least, when he brushes past you and blows away into the one corner of your photo album that the murderous wedding photographer never found, everything will be resolved. Other people’s wars will go on; you don’t give a damn. You’ve never cared much for other people anyway, not the way you should have. There were too many of them, names and faces peeled out of the background like calendar pages, and you were born with a heart already in debt. 

You thought you were going to die so many times…but there he goes. He gets the chance to leave you after all. And you get the chance to relearn (did you ever know?) the meaning of peace. 

She holds your hand because she sees you’re hurting. Her eyes are some color you’re struggling to remember the name of through the boom of cannons in your chest. You love her too. You love her like a man loves his last sunset and there’s got to be some comfort in that. So you’ll leave with her, and live with her. Even now it sounds like almost enough. 

When the East Wind comes a’knockin (what a horrible story to tell a kid) you’ll open the door yourself. 

You open the door of the cab and help your pregnant wife climb in. You follow her inside and lean your head back against the cigarette-smoke seat. John Watson, you are ready to be the kind of man who goes to sleep at night and wakes up in the morning. 

Mycroft taps on the window of the cab. He points to the sky, to where the plane has turned around. Coming from the east. Returning, four minutes later, from the eternity you just watched it fly into. 

The cannons are quiet. The bullets were empty rounds. And because there’s nowhere else to go, you step back out of your slow grave and into the dead air of a firing squad.

**Author's Note:**

> I was gonna apologize for several aspects of this, (the heavy metaphor, the 2nd person narration) but nah...


End file.
